Upward Revenue Stream Dynamics
I’m not very good at deciphering these kinds of things, so forgive me if I’m stating the obvious, but I can’t tell if Ad Age’s article on the rise of Comcast COO Steve Burke is dead serious or a tongue-in-cheek, wryly self-aware reference to “30 Rock”.
I’d like to think that any article in 2010 that opens with
“Steve Burke Will Decide What You See and How You’ll See It — and Change the Ad Model in the Process”
can’t possibly be all that serious. And yet…
At any rate, Jack Donaghy references aside, the end of the article was the most striking to me. While most of the article is about the prowess and ability of the incoming COO, the final paragraph lays out in almost comical brevity the monumental task that sits in front of not just Comcast, but any one who’s tasked with retaining or acquiring the attention of a mass audience - including ad agencies.
“The trouble? Trying to attract the American consumer en masse is never a sure bet, and the trick one uses to do it in the first place doesn’t always work the next time it’s put into practice. Mr. Burke dazzled the ad intelligentsia at a private party, but now he has to entertain the broader population — and entice them to change their behavior — all in a short period of time.”
While most of the articles I’ve been reading recently have centered around the “old vs new”, “big vs small”, “traditional vs digital” debate of the “future of advertising”, they mostly seem to be missing the fact that nearly of these agencies are still fighting the battle of finding mass audience. They all have different approaches, but the goal seems to be the same.
The problem? It’s the same one that faces Mr. Burke: he has to get all the chips to win. His competition only has to get 1000. Or 100. Or even just 10. That’s because his competition isn’t ABC or Fox, it’s the millions of people making content on the web every single hour of every day. People who don’t need 20 million viewers at 8pm to be successful, but are happy to get a few hundred. And the chips at stake are the fixed 24 hours people have to pay attention to anything.
A million people getting 100 viewers is a lot of chips.
The usual response to this is that networks, or agencies, or newspapers if you want to go there, are capable of producing the sort of polished product that amateurs can’t. Which is true, and it’s worth noting that people still like the quality that comes from professionals doing what they do. But that polished content can be just as much a weight as it is an advantage. Because that polish costs money, and that means even less margin for error. When your competition has ability to go through thousands, or millions, of iterations of what amounts to natural selection of ideas, the ability to be wrong is incredibly valuable.
